Jonathan's Hope (4 page)

The call took place the same night, finally sealing Jonathan’s destiny. He didn’t see it coming. If he had, he’d probably left on his own, thus avoiding the forest.

“
YES, MR. CLARKSON
, I understand, and I promise you, it won’t happen again. You know how boys are. They tend to exaggerate, make things up. Who knows, maybe Jonathan was trying to impress your daughter?” His father’s voice was calm and very agreeable on the phone. In fact, he was one smooth son of a bitch, his legal training coming to full bloom in his argument, chuckling into the phone. “You know, Mr. Clarkson, we’ve both been teenagers, remember?” He paused to let the man on the other side remember what it was like to be a teenage boy. Raging hormones, tits wherever you looked, pussy calling his name from between the legs of every girl he saw, even the ugly ones. Oh yes, Mr. Clarkson remembered, after all, that is why he and his wife never left Jonathan and Mary alone behind closed doors.

As the memories resurfaced, so did doubt. Jonathan’s father pressed on. “You know what boys are like, what we were like. You know what we used to say to get what we wanted...” he said, thinking,
just as I’m telling you now, to get you to believe me, you idiot, before I kill that freak
.

“You remember, right, Mr. Clarkson?” Mary’s father blushed, accused, knowing the man on the other side of the phone line had him. Yes, he’d lied to girls, he’d made up all kinds of stories to get his hands in their skirts. To touch the sacred spot, that warm, moist delicious spot that he so desperately wanted to touch, penetrate. Sure, he’d gotten to second base often enough, it had lost part of its magic, part of its appeal. Oh no, don’t get me wrong, Mr. Clarkson still loved tits, still enjoyed tits, not just his wife’s. But that’s a different story altogether. What he really desired more than anything else was the taste of pussy, to be trapped between a woman’s legs, the squeeze of her muscles around him as his tongue adored humanity’s most sacred place. He was an expert on making women come in multiple orgasms, just ask Mary’s mother, not that she’d ever admit as much. But ask her anyway, she could tell you, if she ever would.
No, she wouldn’t!

Jonathan’s father could almost tell from the heavy breathing on the other side of the phone line that he had Mr. Clarkson exactly where he wanted him. All he had to do was to project Mr. Clarkson’s own thoughts onto Jonathan and he’d have a home run. “I am really sorry about this, but you know as well as I do that girls at that age are impressionable, and I’m really sorry that Jonathan took advantage of Mary. I promise you it will never happen again. I apologize for my son’s despicable behavior toward your daughter. I taught him better than that. I guess we’ll need to go back over that lesson. Rest assured, Mary will be safe from him.” With that, he hung up. Mr. Clarkson stared at the phone, wondering what had just happened. How had Jonathan’s father convinced him that Mary misunderstood everything? That Jonathan had only wanted to get to home plate, using the gay card to get close to his daughter, wearing down her guard. Mr. Clarkson was furious. He could’ve killed Jonathan himself, given the chance.

What Mr. Clarkson didn’t realize was that they’d barely touched on the subject of the physical abuse. That Jonathan’s father had never once acknowledged the allegations. Mr. Clarkson slept miserably that night.

So did Jonathan’s dad. Darkness had descended upon the blackness of his soul. Yeah, I know that’s a bit of an oxymoron, but bear with me, okay? There just aren’t words to describe what was going on in his mind that night. He mulled over ways to punish Jonathan. Ways to rid the boy of the ghost that had plagued him all his life. To save him from the experiences he had endured. He realized that he’d lost the battle, lost his son. He resigned himself to the recognition that Jonathan had always been a lost cause. There had been signs all along. Jonathan was gay. He had always been gay, and there was only one thing left to do. Jonathan had to die.

The question he mulled over for the rest of the night was how. How was he going to kill his son and rid him of his homosexuality without actually having to kill him? Hurt him, he could, but he couldn’t shoot him, although he technically had the means. He couldn’t stab him with a kitchen knife, or poison him, or strangle him. Not that he couldn’t do it, but he knew he wouldn’t. If you won’t, you can’t, it’s that simple.

He knew that his son was dead to him. He was dead although he was still physically alive, breathing in his room, two doors down. Oddly, he hadn’t touched him that night. Hadn’t seen him after the call from Mr. Clarkson. Jonathan was dead, but how would he dispose of his body?

It was raining for the next two days, and that is when Jonathan’s father decided that they’d go to their summer house and pick mushrooms. It was his wife’s favorite past time, and he felt it would make it easier on her.

Saturday came and the sun was out. It was bleak, but there was still a bit of warmth in each ray that hit Jonathan when they left the city for the three-hour drive to their summer house near the great forest. His father had inherited the house, a hunting cabin, from his parents, and they went there every now and then during the summer. They rarely spent the night, because it was too small now that Jonathan was all but grown up. But they spent time there anyway. It always made Jonathan feel good. He could roam the forest, pick berries, watch the birds, squirrels, deer and even the occasional rabbit.

The forest itself was immense. Spanning an area of over twenty-five thousand square miles, it was the largest forest in the country. There were a few roads leading to some of the outlying parts, a couple lakes that Jonathan knew had cabins on their shorelines, but most of the houses were built along the forest’s southern edge, where they could benefit from the summer sun. The view into the adjacent valley, where farmers grew corn, wheat and potatoes, was beautiful yet they still had access to the fresh and cool air of the woods. The forest was placed under government protection, a wildlife sanctuary, a national park of sorts, so you weren’t allowed to chop down any trees, and no new buildings could be constructed anywhere inside the park boundaries. Fortunately, the ones that had existed could be maintained, given they followed strict regulations.

That day, Jonathan’s father didn’t even drive to their summer house. They’d brought along a basket with some food they could eat while they were collecting the mushrooms. Jonathan was excited, hoping that he’d get some time alone in the forest to see some animals, and enjoy the fresh air. His mother was unusually excited, as her supply of dried mushrooms from the previous year was all but gone. Jonathan’s dad was mostly silent as he drove the car.

He left the main road in an area Jonathan didn’t recognize, at least twenty miles from their house, turning onto an unpaved road, heading straight into the forest. Now this isn’t your typical forest where you just have pines or spruce trees. It’s not the modern type that is grown, cultivated. No, this was an old forest where many different trees grew, from oaks to ash trees, fir, spruce and the odd pine in higher elevations. On the ground, depending on the surrounding vegetation, there were bushes of blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, fern and moss. To some, it looked like a forest from a nightmare. You know, the kind you’ve seen in Harry Potter, minus the spiders. This forest was darker, yet green, not threatening in any way.

He finally parked the car and they fanned out in different directions to pick berries and mushrooms. Jonathan took off in the opposite direction of his parents, not saying much to either of them. It had been a weird week. His father had barely spoken to him, his mom never talked much anyway, but the weirdest thing was that his father hadn’t so much as touched him. The wound on his flank was healing nicely, and when Jonathan counted the days since his last beating, he figured it must’ve been a full week. He smiled, and ventured deeper into the woods, believing that distance would shield him for a little while longer, just in case his father changed his mind.

He collected quite a bit of berries that day, lots of lingonberries and some of his mom’s favorite mushrooms. It was too late in the season for blueberries and blackberries.
Too bad, really, I love blueberries.

When he eventually returned to the site where they had parked, the car was gone. His parents had left him. Packing his mom into the car, her basket barely half-full, his father turned around the car and dashed off, leaving Jonathan behind. Leaving him to die, never wanting to see him again.

He knew that Jonathan wouldn’t return. He knew that even if the boy survived, he’d never come back to them. No human being in their right mind would voluntarily subject themselves to more of the same treatment he had subjected Jonathan to in the almost eighteen years of his life.

No, Jonathan would go somewhere else. If he survived the forest, he’d be eighteen years old and could walk away. Get as far away as he possibly could, and never return. If he died in the forest, it wasn’t on his hands. He wouldn’t ever know if Jonathan failed the final test of manhood.

That was how Jonathan’s father reasoned, and he had been right.

Jonathan stood in the spot where they had parked a couple of hours earlier, looking at the tracks left behind by his father’s jeep, trying to picture his father climbing into the car, and his mother strapping on her seat belt. Jonathan wondered how his mother never once came to his rescue, never once defended him. She probably didn’t protest leaving her son behind in the forest.

Yet in this instance, Jonathan was wrong. She had indeed protested. For the first time in almost eighteen years, the full brunt of her husband’s wrath was unleashed on her, leaving her bleeding from her lips, and unconscious just long enough for Jonathan’s father to strap her into her seat and drive off. Jonathan’s mother didn’t protest for very long, but she did try. She had finally spoken up. Unfortunately, it was too late, and Jonathan would never know.

FAST FORWARD BACK
into the cabin where Jonathan had eventually ended up, some fifty miles from the place his father and mother had left him to his own devices. He was still a few days away from turning eighteen, a fact that left Dan unnerved, but that didn’t bother Jonathan, as he was oblivious to it.

Jonathan was far from being in a place where he could love anyone, let alone think about sex or whatever else it was that was going through Dan’s mind. Jonathan was all about survival, nothing else mattered. Had he spent one more night out in the cold, he would have died, frozen to death, caught unprotected in the forest by the sudden onslaught of winter.

After the realization of his parent’s disappearance had finally sunk into the bottom of Jonathan’s mind, he decided to find a place to spend the night. He was exhausted, and he was hungry. He had only few dollars in his pocket, an ATM card, but what good did that do if there’s no ATM to withdraw money from? He had his student ID card in his wallet as well, but that was about it. He had no cell phone, as his father never allowed him to have one. Too many homosexuals out there, his father had sighed, after a particularly painful beating. Not that Jonathan had asked the question, but his father always inferred things, and the laptop that Jonathan had been issued at his school was enough to infuriate him.

That night, Jonathan walked back in the direction in which he’d gone to pick the cranberries a few hours earlier. There would likely be more, and he was hungry. Jonathan was a smart individual. He didn’t even touch the berries and mushrooms in his basket, he simply picked more, eating those. If he had to move on, he’d need sustenance, not knowing what he’d find further down his path.
Wherever that will lead me...

He found an ash twig and managed to start a small fire to keep himself warm that night. The sky was clear and Jonathan could even see a glimpse of the moon through the crowns of the trees above him. He wasn’t scared, but sleep didn’t come easily that night. There was the fire that needed feeding and the surface was hard, despite the moss he had gathered. Eventually, he fell asleep from pure exhaustion, at least for a couple of hours.

When he woke up in the morning, he was cold, the fire was long dead. That was when Jonathan made his first mistake. He didn’t collect more twigs from the ash tree when he moved on. He didn’t really know which way to go, but he knew that the city was to the southeast so he decided to move in the opposite direction.
See, told you he would,
his father would have commented.

Jonathan tried to follow the path of the sun, traveling northeast towards the sunrise. The moss on tree trunks pointed in the northern direction and helped him keep his sense of direction, or so he thought. He paid good attention in school and knew that in the northern hemisphere, the northern pointing part of a tree trunk would often be in the shadow, and thus more prone to the growth of moss. He wasn’t sure that was true, but it seemed to work, and he made steady progress. Every now and then, he collected large patches of moss from the ground, and looked for caves or other protected places to spend the next night.

More than anything, he looked for edible things, berries and mushrooms, and water. Water was easy enough, luckily. He came across several streams, but after a couple of days, he’d run out of berries and he’d eaten the last mushrooms on the third day. His final breakfast.

That day he didn’t eat anything else, and he didn’t venture far. He found a cave and settled into it. It was dry and the ground relatively soft inside, probably a lair of some kind. He just hoped it wasn’t home to a bear or a wolverine. Jonathan wasn’t sure what kind of animals actually lived in this forest. He hadn’t seen any predators so far, and he kept his distance from deer and antelopes, trying not to scare them. After all, this wasn’t his home, he was merely visiting and he didn’t want to disturb the local wildlife more than necessary.

It was odd to Jonathan that he wasn’t afraid. But for some reason, his survival instincts kicked in almost immediately after he’d stood where his parent’s car had been parked. He hadn’t really thought about it. Why was he so cool about being abandoned? But really there was little time to think. He had to survive, he had to stay alive. That was the only thing that mattered.

On the fourth day, hunger woke him. There was no food to be found that morning, but by lunchtime, he’d found a small well and quenched his thirst and hunger with water. He probably drank half a gallon before moving on. He found another large ash, and cut a couple of twigs, this time remembering not to throw away the log after he’d successfully lit a fire that night.

He packed his few belongings into the basket the next morning and continued his trek. Unable to tell how long he’d walked every day or if he’d been walking in circles, he tried to follow the path of the sun and the moss on the trees. He felt weak, forced to eat moss to get some sustenance in his body, along with the water he found. The first time he started chewing the moss, he almost threw it all up again. He resisted the urge, afraid of what the moss would do to his stomach and intestinal tract. He knew that some of the moss was edible, but he doubted that he’d found the right one, not remembering his teachers ever speaking of moss in terms of a dietary alternative.

He learned the lesson the hard way the next day, when his bowel movements went from bad to worse, so he stopped eating the moss, instead focusing on cones, mostly from firs. They were tiny, and getting the little seeds out to chew on burned more calories than he ingested. He was getting tired. He’d lost weight, could almost see it melt away from him. At least he still had water. Water was never an issue, but without any real food, he’d soon starve.

On the tenth day of his ordeal, the cold had started to descend into the forest and Jonathan became afraid. His clothes weren’t meant for any kind of extended outdoor stay. His sneakers were mostly wet from the moisture on the ground. His clothes were damp, torn in places they’d gotten stuck to trees or rocks, trying to access the odd mushroom or a cone that the squirrels hadn’t hidden for their own benefit yet.

He found a small cave that evening, but since it had rained all day, there was no chance to get a fire going. His hands were bleeding from rubbing the ash twig against a small piece of wood, trying for a long time before he finally gave up. He was too exhausted. He nearly froze that night and sleep never came to relieve him.

Well, actually, it did, early in the morning, the result of pure exhaustion. When he woke up again, less than an hour later, the ground was slightly frozen, and Jonathan’s jacket was stiff, as were his jeans. He was freezing to the core. He could barely feel his feet. He got up and noticed that he couldn’t make out the sun, but since he knew where he’d come from, and still had the moss on the trees as his companions, he set off, starting his day by jumping up and down carefully, afraid his feet might just break off from the cold.

They didn’t, and after throwing his arms around himself for a while, a bit of warmth returned to his body, but he was too exhausted to keep it up. He started walking slowly, taking deliberate steps, as the rocks were slippery from the cold, and his body still felt stiff.

He didn’t know how he would survive much longer in the cold without any food. He hadn’t seen another person in ten days. His thoughts went back to his parents. They had abandoned him, and now he would probably die, unless some sort of wonder could save him. Jonathan wasn’t a spiritual person. He didn’t believe in gods or ghosts or spirits of any kind, and thus didn’t really expect a wonder, but at that stage of his ordeal, all he really had left was hope. Hope that something might happen. Hope that something would come to his rescue. What that would be, he didn’t know.

That night he didn’t find any decent shelter. He didn’t want to stop, but didn’t really have much of a choice once the sun set and the forest fell dark. He couldn’t see shit and eventually had to stop. He’d stumbled over a rock and fell on his knee, feeling the sudden rush of the warm blood trickling down his leg. Luckily, just beyond the rock was a small, unoccupied cave. Jonathan crawled into it. The place was still dry, although he was not.

Lying on the ground that night, snow falling, wind howling through the trees, Jonathan got no sleep. His knee was hurting, his palms were still raw from falling over and trying to light fires, his stomach had given up on him, his throat felt raw and every time he swallowed, his entire upper body ached.

Let this be over. Maybe I can die right here, right now, tonight. Nobody misses me. Nobody will search for me. Nobody will ever find my remains, except maybe a wolverine or a badger.

Jonathan didn’t die that night. He found a hole in the ground less than three miles from Dan’s house, but he didn’t know that then. When dawn broke the next morning, Jonathan was too exhausted to get up. It had snowed a few inches the night before, but the large tree canopy above him kept most of that snow many feet above him. In small patches, where the canopy wasn’t dense enough, the snow had fallen to the ground. Jonathan took some of it and put it in his mouth, eating it to quench his thirst. He also washed his face with the snow, despite the icy cold feeling. The cold snow did wake him up. Woke his senses, allowing him to focus on what would most likely be his last day alive. If the weather stayed that cold, there was no way he’d make it through another night. Not unless he found shelter. Not unless we was able to start a fire.

He spent most of the day seeking shelter, but despaired as none was to be found. Besides, what good did shelter do if he had no means to light a fire and keep it warm? What good did a warm shelter do if he didn’t have any food?

As the afternoon approached, more quickly than Jonathan had wanted, his spirit sank.
That’s it, I’m dead
. That’s when he noticed a clearing in the forest just ahead of him, quite a big clearing, too. The sun set as he left the forest to see the lake. It was barely frozen, still early in the season.

Jonathan looked around the lake and noticed movement on the far end of the lake, probably a deer. He retreated into the forest, watching the animal approach his position. Only, this wasn’t a deer. It was a person and a dog.

Jonathan could barely believe what he saw. Was this the miracle he’d been waiting for? He couldn’t move. He couldn’t bring himself to approach the man walking there, just a few hundred feet from him. The man looked sad, in deep thought, his shoulders drooping as he led his dog along the shore. He stopped every now and then, looking out over the lake, pondering, for what seemed like an eternity. He seemed…lonely.

Jonathan watched him, wanting to get up and walk out to him. To hold him, comfort him, but was unable to make his muscles move. It seemed as if the man was crying, really sad about something. He watched as the man continued his walk around the lake. It was almost dark. The sky above him was clear and Jonathan knew instinctively that it would be a very cold night, his last unless he got to safety.

The man and his dog disappeared from his sight. Willing his body into a final act of force, he got up and followed the tracks, walking slowly along the shore of the lake. That’s when he saw the lights. About half a mile away from him was a small cabin on the shore, just at the edge of the forest. Jonathan knew he had to will his body that distance, despite the dark, despite tripping over himself, despite the pain in his joints and his bones.

Jonathan pressed on, finally reaching the cabin and looked inside. The man he had seen earlier was sitting in a rocking chair, a cup in his hand. A fire was burning in the fireplace, radiating heat, a dog casually spread on a quilt in front of it. The scenery was so peaceful it brought tears to Jonathan’s eyes.

He crossed the few steps to the door and knocked.